Rosa lived with her son, Davi, in a small house located on a mountainside in a favela of twenty thousand residents. Rosa’s grandmother lived upstairs, and in the last, most decrepit shack on the road lived blind old Gustavo with his three chickens. Then the street ended at a wall with a slope beyond so steep it was impossible to traverse. Unless you had the nimbleness and strength and courage of an acrobat. But the agile children of the neighborhood had grown big. These days they had other things to do than climb on the mountain. They had become quick, dexterous, and extremely perishable. Only a few of them returned from roaming out in the world, with hard faces and gold chains around their necks. The ones born after them were still too small and too afraid. They were either sucking at the breast or chasing balls in the street, and the mountain slope could be at peace, likewise the tin roof of Gustavo’s house, which was the best place to start onto the slope if you wanted to go there for some reason.
With all her miserable heart Rosa Imaculada loved her small son, who had come into being almost virginally, during Carnival. Now or never, Rosa had thought. I want a husband and a family! So Rosa made herself up. She glowed and shimmered, giving off a lovely, provocative scent of carnations, which made the stray dogs howl as she waddled past them in her sequined high heels.
And things went as intended. A certain Caio (or was it Flávio?) let her take his hand as the axé music played, as the drums beat, as the wild, howling whistle blared the chorus and the güiro grated rolling, enticing rhythms in the air. Caio (or Flávio or João or Fernando or Antônio) was driven mad by this woman who smelled of carnations and shook her buttocks properly in time with the music, who whispered in his left ear that she was a respectable woman and then immediately murmured in his right ear that yes, she was a woman—a woman who needed love, and for once the planets were in alignment. Vamos, vamos, let’s go!
Rosa and the man rollicked in the throng. They danced and kissed each other with lips wet with sweet maracujá juice and strong cachaça and nearly swooned. Finally, as the drums still beat, they slipped from the press of the crowd into a dark alley and joined, quickly and intensely, in the first doorway they found by fumbling with their hands.
That was how Davi came to be.
She never heard from the man again. The phone number he left Rosa was fake. But the boy born of his seed was healthy and fat, breathtakingly beautiful and hair-raisingly loud, and above all Rosa’s very own. Davi would not disappear. Rosa would see to that. She would raise her son into a man, not a rat in the shape of one. Davi clearly agreed. He cried day and night, those cries filling the small house and his mother’s heart, the heart which began to act up even worse after the child’s birth.
It was April. Rosa was rocking her six-month-old son in her arms when suddenly her heart skipped a beat and then only weakly returned to operation. Rosa sat down on the floor and couldn’t get up under her own power any more. The baby screamed and Rosa couldn’t lift him to her breast. The whole house and street filled with ear-splitting bawling that didn’t end until the grandmother finally arrived, snatched up the boy, who was sweltering from his cries, and ran three blocks down as fast as her legs would carry her to pound on the door of the largest and tallest house and yell, “Mr. Rogerio, come help!”
And so old Doctor Rogerio struggled up the hillside after the grandmother, up the same hillside that Rosa Imaculada hadn’t been able to climb for ages without becoming winded. When she was expecting Davi she had been forced to take long breaks, during which she traded gossip with the women who came by on the street, as much as she could amidst her fits of coughing. She thought that the panting was all part of pregnancy at the comfortably plump age of thirty-five. She thought that the cough that troubled her, especially during physical exertion, was caused by dust. She hadn’t had the energy to clean her home, and there was dust at work too. The Salão de beleza Alessandra, where she styled, was full of hair and chemicals that smelled nice but irritated the lining of her throat. She was more sensitive and that was normal, all the women said. Irritants simply bothered you more when you were pregnant.
But this time they were wrong. Most wrong of all was Rosa Imaculada, who knew within her, in a place that someone less knowledgeable might call the heart, that all was not well. But the desire to have a child was great, and the fear of losing that child was even greater. Just as human brains often do, erroneously, when threatened with danger, so Rosa’s brain forced into her consciousness the command, Flee! And Rosa didn’t know how to interpret the command other than in the way that was natural to her: she buried her head in the sand.
Rosa reeled. Rosa gasped. Rosa endured a frailty that began to be more miserable than her eighty-year-old grandmother’s infirmity, at its
